Time in Eternity, Eternity in Time

 I have been reading a Communio article by David Schindler called Time in Eternity, Eternity in Time  .   It's what might be called a theological essay; he calls it a reflection.  He brings TS Eliot and Balthasar together to try to get at a concept of time and eternity that would make our concept of action and contemplation less dualistic and consequently reductionist.    

In spite of a couple of rereadings, I didn't get to a point where I felt like I understood the argument completely, though there were some glancing insights in various parts of the essay.    The ground he establishes at the beginning is familiar.  Greek philosophers made a distinction between action and contemplation -- action was what you got out of the way, the necessary business of living as a human in the temporal world, so that you could go about contemplation, which was the highest business of humans as such.  But not all humans were fitted for contemplation, and even those that were could not contemplate all the time.  So contemplation took place before and after action.   Eastern thought took the matter still further, holding material things to be an illusion; contemplation and only contemplation was a participation in the real.

Our modern society maintained the duality but favors action, thinking contemplation a waste of time except perhaps as a stress-reducing leisure activity.   

Schindler wants to think through some of Balthasar's (inspired by Simone Weil) thoughts on the nature of the Trinity, with reference to certain passsages of TS Eliot's Four Seasons.  He calls such the results of such reflections more of the nature of "paradox" in arrangement of the concepts, than dialectically in opposition, where one is 

TS Eliot evokes a timeless time, a motionless movement, a still point that is yet a "dance":

At the still point of the turning world. ...

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement.
And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

Balthasar refers to the timelessness of the Trinity as not a deficit of Time, but a superabundance of what time is:  expectation, fulfillment -- past, present and future all together, dynamically, not simply an eternal "Now", which would seem to be static.   He points to the same thing with the relationship of the Persons of the Trinity.   There is not change, in the sense that humans change as they move towards or away from perfection, because the Trinity is perfect -- complete.    But there is an eternal "begetting" and "procession", not a movement toward or away, but an ongoing and complete dynamism.  To better explain Balthasar's ideas than I am doing here, Schindler translates but then parenthesizes a lot of the German words that Balthasar uses. ... Uridee for overriding idea and Uber-fullung for a kind of super-fulfillment are two I remember, but there were perhaps a score more.   I suspecct Balthasar's thought is probably difficult to translate.... the German allows those abstract-noun power combos that do not come across as readily in English.

I can go along with the sense of wonder in these considerations but ultimately my theological vision fails me way before the those of Schindler, Balthasar and Eliot fail them.   Here again is what I was saying about lacking some of the preparation I would need to really incorporate these thoughts into my mental furniture.

He concludes by reasserting his earlier point that contemplation and action are disserved by conceptual duality, by a prioritizing of one over the other.   They are related -- they participate in each other, in the way that to Eliot the dance is a stillness in the center point of time and space.   Contemplation without action becomes sterile and empty;  action without contemplation becomes a bit like the famous "jumping on to your horse and riding madly off in all directions".   And certainly, history tends to bear this out, if you consider the Greeks, and then what is happening with us now.  

Though he did not refer to it, certainly the Benedictine "ora et labora" comes to mind here for me -- the essential integrity and unity of the two.    For humans, presumably because we are limited to sequence, these things seem to have to have their part in a temporal cycle, and Scripture seems to reinforce this -- God rested on the 7th day, and we also are called to do this.    Rather than a dichotomy or an oppositional distinction, there is kind of a complementariness and completeness which is a participation in the Trinitarian life.    We transcend our cyclicar/sequential boundedness this way.

Again, I can kind of see it as I read, but not completely, and perhaps as a genre, theological essays of this kind are meant to be more of a suggestion, a pointing and sketching, than a comprehensive system even in part.